It started with the image of the knife upon the counter,
the way it sat there gleaming while I tried hard to surmount it,
the thought arrived unbidden, very clear and very bright,
what if I just took it, what if that could happen tonight.
I set the knife in the back drawer, blade-down, rubber-banded,
I know the thought is not intent but still I left it stranded,
because the thought was detailed in a way that gave me pause,
the thought had its own momentum, its own terrible laws.
By the following week the images had shifted and expanded,
I think of heights while driving, think of what was left unplanned,
I hold my nephew and the thought strikes like a short circuit,
what if I just dropped him, and the fear becomes explicit.
The horror is not wanting it, the horror is the clarity,
the way the image renders with a photographer’s severity,
the paradox of trying not to think the thing you fear
is that the effort of suppression makes it reappear.
But knowing does not stop it, understanding is no cure,
the images keep cycling through my chest and they endure,
arriving at the edges of each task I try to start,
and I keep being confronted with the butcher in my heart:
what does it mean that part of me imagines it in detail,
what does it mean that part of me constructs the full exhale
of consequence before the thought is filed and put away,
and then it files itself, and then it comes back the next day.